Yamaha Corporation is developing and advocating its SoundUDTM collection of cloud technologies and platforms for supporting universal design in sound.
In 2017, the Yamaha Group established the SoundUD™ Consortium, an organization in which Yamaha Corporation is acting as the secretariat, with the objective of helping create a sustainable society in which there are no concerns about language or hearing ability. Yamaha Corporation is promoting the creation of innovation and new business models originating from Japan while helping facilitate the popularization of SoundUD™ technologies together with the more than 360 member companies and organizations (as of March 31, 2023). Efforts by the consortium to date have included the deployment of a multilanguage announcement system for use by senior citizens, people with disabilities who may have difficulty hearing announcements, as well as non-Japanese individuals who may not understand Japanese. This concept and the success of our activities have earned praise, resulting in the consortium being presented with a number of honors.
Another service of this nature is the Remote Cheerer powered by SoundUD™ remote cheering system developed by Yamaha. This system involves an app that helps users to engage with sports in an interactive manner, even when viewing from home or other remote locations. This service has been used at more than 500 events, including soccer, baseball, and basketball games, relaying over 100 million expressions of support from spectators. In 2022, this service won an award for excellence in the fourth Nihon Service Award, a program organized by Japan Productivity Center and SPRING for the purpose of recognizing innovative services. We have developed a commercial-use interphone service that can be used via smartphone. Named Intercom via your Smartphone, this service employs universal design principles, including the options for text communication via keyboard input and multilanguage support using machine translation, to ensure that it can be used with ease by anyone. A Gold Award was received for this service in the Interaction Design category of IAUD International Design Awards 2022.
Furthermore, awards were received in the 2022 Good Design Award program (organized by the Japan Institute of Design Promotion) for Intercom via your Smartphone powered by SoundUD™, an extension of the aforementioned interphone service, as well as for the Text and Sound Based Multilingual Announcement System powered by SoundUD™ commercial-use public announcement system developed jointly with USEN CORPORATION, which was also included in the GOOD DESIGN BEST 100 due to its particularly high evaluation.